How do I figure calories for an entire recipe?

  • Is there a website that can help me with this? I have a recipe for tomato & cucumber salad with feta but not really sure what the entire calorie count will be...i would also like to learn how to cook and know what calories are in whatever dish I am making! I hope i am making sense?
  • Yep.

    I used to use an exel spreadsheet, I entered the total number of calories for each ingredient. When I was finished, I added everything together for the total number of calories for the finished product. Then, I divided by the number of servings.

    Then, I clicked "save" so I always had that info for that dish! It was just a hassle the first time I made it.
  • most sites will let you create recipes. you add in all the ingredients then put in how many servings it makes.

    you can do this without a program if you know the calories for what you have in it. add all the calories of the ingredients together and divide by number of servings.
  • sparkrecipes.com You input all your ingrediants and you can even put number of servings
  • This is the website I use pretty often, but it sometimes has trouble recognizing some ingredients. I will have to try the other site mentioned by beerab!

    http://caloriecount.about.com/cc/recipe_analysis.php
  • I just add up the calories for the recipe and divide by the number of servings. Takes all of 10 minutes. I save the recipe in a note in a folder on my computer and call it a day. A handwritten note on a card or in a notebook would serve just as well if you prefer. Do this for a while and in no time all your commonly used recipes will be saved

    I always include the total calories for the dish in the note and the calories for each individual ingredient. That way if you make a last minute change to the number of servings or an ingredient it's fast and easy to recalculate the calories.
  • I second sparkrecipes.com!
    http://recipes.sparkpeople.com/recipe-calculator.asp

    They have more food items already in their database than most other calculators do. If you search shared items there are even more foods listed. I have used other sites in the past but found it so time consuming to have to manually enter so many of the ingredients because they weren't in the database.
  • Quote: I just add up the calories for the recipe and divide by the number of servings. Takes all of 10 minutes. I save the recipe in a note in a folder on my computer and call it a day. A handwritten note on a card or in a notebook would serve just as well if you prefer. Do this for a while and in no time all your commonly used recipes will be saved

    I always include the total calories for the dish in the note and the calories for each individual ingredient. That way if you make a last minute change to the number of servings or an ingredient it's fast and easy to recalculate the calories.
    This is how i do it too. I will list all this information on the recipe book that i keep.
  • Thanks for the link to that calorie count website, heavyandhomebound. I'd been using sparkrecipes, but sometimes it takes so long to input each ingredient individually. It's so nice to be able to copy and paste from a recipe online, even if you have to futz with the wording to get it to work.
  • Quote: Thanks for the link to that calorie count website, heavyandhomebound. I'd been using sparkrecipes, but sometimes it takes so long to input each ingredient individually. It's so nice to be able to copy and paste from a recipe online, even if you have to futz with the wording to get it to work.
    I agree - that calorie count website is great. BUT BE CAREFUL! I often have a hard time getting it to find the correct food. Usually resulting in way under or way over calories. I strongly suggest checking the calories of EACH item you add and make sure it seems accurate. Especially beans, I dunno what it is - but that site DOES NOT understand 1 cup chickpeas or 1 cup black beans - there is not 600+ calories in one cup of either of those.

    I much prefer sparkpeople for recipes - yes it takes WAY longer, but at least it is right (or close to it). I also use sparkpeople for my calorie counting so it make it easy to add to my day.

    I will use the caloriecount website if I am in a hurry, but I kinda gave up on it for the most part.
  • Well, jeez. That's disappointing, sotypical,

    Thanks very much for the heads up, though! I guess I will also only use it when I'm in a hurry. That chickpeas thing is really weird. I can't figure out where that would come from.